[RedRover]

McCarthy became a pariah because he fell into a trap common to people who become passionate about an agenda. They become so busy storming the walls of their enemy's fortress that they forget to ask, "Is this the right wall?" or "Is this the right fortress?" or even "Is this the enemy?"

Commies were, and still are, our enemies. "McCarthyism", like "swiftboating", should mean combatting an enemy with the truth. I couldn't get past the headline.

[Quix]

I think most hereon would agree that McCarthy was right on . . . except for some of his blackwashing on minimal info in some particular cases.

[shield]

Commies were, and still are, our enemies. "McCarthyism", like "swiftboating", should mean combatting an enemy with the truth.

Yes, I agree.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

McCarthy became a pariah because he fell into a trap common to people who become passionate about an agenda.

Some times "the medium is the [real] message," and the medium denies the nominal message. That is illustrated by a story by the B&W TV standup comic Herb Shriner:

A man walked up to my sister in the lobby of a hotel once and handed her a note. It read, 'You are the only woman I have ever loved. Please come to me in room 216.'

She wasn't sure it was sincere, though - it was mimeographed!

(For those of you in Rio Linda, a mimeograph was the kind of duplicating machine people used before there were Xerox machines. The markings it produced on paper were a distintive blue color).

In the spirit of Shriner's joke, Leslie Fiedler in 1954 captured the essence of the smear perpetrated on (not by) Joe McCarthy thusly:

From one end of the country to another rings the cry, 'I am cowed! I am afraid to speak out!', and the even louder response, 'Look, he is cowed! He is afraid to speak out.'

You cannot, after all, scream on nationwide TV that you are afraid to speak out, without having the medium of the message drown out the nominal message. If you are so afraid to speak, how come you're on TV speaking??? If you tried to speak out like that on TV in Iraq under Saddam, you would go into the plastic shredder before you got near a TV broadcast studio. Allowing Saddam appologists to point out that you never heard anyone complain. And that Saddam got essentially all of the (public, not secret) ballot.

Yet it is just this sort of "proof" that liberals rely on to convince people that McCarthy was censoring people for no reason. But mostly, they depend on not having to prove their smears. Ann documented this thoroughly in Treason - but although she was able to get a book tour, she was always "balanced" by a liberal critic as well as the "neutral" moderator who was in fact as liberal as the "balancing" critic.